The innocent eye comes from the same school of thought that produced the so-called “noble savage”, a description coined by the poet John Dryden in 1672, but most familiar to us from translations of the works of the French-Swiss philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his early writings, Rousseau reckoned that anything “natural” - by which he meant unsophisticated, uncontrived, unaffected or unspoiled - qualified as noble, since it hadn’t been perverted by society and civilization, twin evils that inevitably corrupt everything they touch. So those Romantic poets, most notably Wordsworth, who populated their work with children and beggars, had clearly taken this basic idea on board wholesale. As did all those later writers who travelled to “primitive” societies in order to re-invigorate their muse. The innocent eye was basically an ignorant eye which knew nothing of whole swathes of human experience, or was desperately trying to forget what it did know in order to regain the simplicity and purity of childhood - or mankind at early stages in his evolution. But then Rousseau refined his thoughts, taking nature to mean the spontaneity of the process by which man builds his mind and his interior world. Nature now signified a forward-looking intellectual freedom, and hence, the restoration of man not so much to wearing a loincloth and eating nuts and berries, but man cultivating an intellectual independence, transcending society’s attempts to make him conform. Man had to disentangle himself from whatever hindered the free flow of thought or else his destiny would be to travel in a series of never-ending intellectual circles. So you could say that from this standpoint, innocence is far from being a state of ignorance, and is actually a confident state of self-awareness that has the strength and wisdom to confront the forces that are ranged against it. Now translate that argument into literature and you’ve got the innocent eye, one that continuously generates meaning from the ground up, minimizing the writer’s reliance on pre-existing, pre-packaged or pre-conceived frameworks of any kind. Tzara and Burroughs imply this in their desire to re-write Shakespeare and Rimbaud, maybe even combining the works of both writers into new aggregations of meaning. What use, they seem to be asking, is reading the same text over and over again? Try some new juxtapositions and see what happens! Anyone can do it! So, in our investigations of literary movements from Romanticism through Symbolism to Dada and beyond, the common denominator for meaning lies with the artist and his creative powers. The outside world has gradually declined in importance over the period from 1790 to the present, to the point where we’re about to abandon it completely. Which brings us to the second legacy of Dada: Surrealism. In many respects, it’s not too simplistic to claim that Dada + Freud = Literary Surrealism. For many Dadaists, the natural progression of their thought was to move on from simple iconoclasm and randomness towards a deeper exploration of the farther reaches of the subconscious mind, using the new techniques of dream analysis to help them. By the mid-to-late 1920’s, psychoanalysis was promising nothing less than a revolution in self-awareness, and many artists signed up to an aesthetic vision which, they hoped, would yield a rich new seam of subject matter. The Surrealist writers, who included Andre Breton (who had met Freud), Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard were actually pulling back from the idea of meaninglessness in the hope of constructing something more substantial from the wreckage created by Dada. So you could say the pendulum suspended over our Meaning Line has reached the furthest rightward trajectory of its arc, and has now started to swing back the other way; what psychological exploration promised was new ways of bringing together disparate and seemingly unrelated fragments of experience into new, compelling formations, but at a deeper level of consciousness than had previously been thought to exist. There are basically two main thrusts in Surrealism: the suppression of consciousness in favour of the unconscious; and the desire to allow the subconscious to emerge unaltered from the psyche so it can be interpreted. And you won’t be surprised to know that, yes, it had its manifestos; Breton alone wrote three, in 1924, 1930, and 1942. From the second comes this: Everything leads us to believe that there is a certain state of mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, height and depth are no longer perceived as contradictory. Back in Part 1, I noted that a good deal of Western philosophy has originated from the clash of opposites, and that in literary criticism, concepts are often explored using binary models. Yet Surrealism, for all its weirdness, was essentially trying to transcend this divisive vision by stressing the human mind’s capacity to associate elements which, on the surface, appear to have nothing in common. So, as far as meaning goes, a Surrealist metaphor is not stating that “this is like that”; it’s saying exactly the opposite, challenging the subconscious to bring Form and Meaning together in combinations that owe little or nothing to received knowledge or practice. Or rather, Form and Significance. Again, it’s not difficult to try for yourself. A traditional metaphor will equate, for example, night with blackness and evil. Now explode that metaphor, by adding a random element, say, night with whiteness and evil. Or day with blackness and evil. Or night with blackness and good. Or maybe night with a lobster and evil. At the very least, it’ll scramble your preconceptions; and you may even come up with an imaginative new way of linking them together. And for Breton, the willingness to continually explode and reconstitute the metaphor was the hallmark of the successful poet, as he remarked in ‘Les Vases Communicants’ published in 1932: The spirit is marvellously prompt to seize the faintest rapport that exists between two objects selected by chance and the poets know they can always, without fear of deceit, say that the one is like the other: the only hierarchy that may be established among poets can rest solely upon the greater or lesser liberty which they demomstrate in this respect. So unlike Dada, which exploded the metaphor and left it in pieces, Surrealism looks for new ways to reassemble it. But in order to reassemble it, the poet’s brain must be thoroughly purged of preconceptions. And then the writer will regain the status of the Noble Savage, with a wonderful reconditioned set of senses that are alert to even the remotest metaphorical possibilities. It’s a wonderfully circular process, one of continuous perceptual and conceptual emancipation. With the Dadaists, chaos was fun; with the Surrealists, it was good. One last observation. The Surrealist poets, of whom Paul Eluard is perhaps the best example, were always pretty strong on the subject of love. Because, after all, love is the fusion of self (the familiar) with other (the unfamiliar), producing an emotion you know you’re experiencing, but can’t wholly understand. Now there’s Surrealism for you. So let’s close with Eluard’s masterful love poem ‘L’Amoureuse’, translated by Samuel Beckett. She is standing on my lids And her hair is in my hair She has the colour of my eye She has the body of my hand In my shade she is engulfed As a stone against the sky She will never close her eyes And she does not let me sleep And her dreams in the bright day Make the suns evaporate And me laugh cry and laugh Speak when I have nothing to say A beautifully tender poem, that, and not terribly Surreal. Eluard’s need to express his love evidently transcends the demands of any aesthetic theory he may have subscribed to. You’ll probably have noticed that this is true of many of the authors we’ve looked at in this section - it’s easier for the writer to formulate or pay lip service to rules than to obey them. What works on the level of a theoretical premise at some point has to be translated into words, principle into practice, and writers being creatively perverse creatures don’t often consider themselves bound by rules, even ones they’ve formulated for themselves. That’s assuming, of course, they actually can. So while an author’s critical thoughts may be indicative of what he was thinking on the day he wrote them, the caravan tends to move on very quickly. It’s often been said that if you read the works of Ruskin, for every assertion he makes, he contradicts it elsewhere in his writings. And this is the case with most creative minds. They’re too busy creating stuff to take rules into account. And in any case, as writers grow and develop, their talent may well take them in any number of different aesthetic directions. Artists who don’t run the risk of growing stale, their meaning formulaic. So in this section, when I’ve mentioned a school or genre of writing, or identified an aesthetic principle, it’s not been with the intention of tying writers down, or holding them strictly to their word, because to do so is to restrict your own potential enjoyment of their work. We can’t always judge Ezra Pound’s poetry using Imagistic doctrine because he quickly moved on from that particular aesthetic. So while the style of ‘The Cantos’ may reflect aspects of Pound’s Imagistic period, their meaning is far richer than an understanding of Imagism alone can accommodate. Yet that understanding of Imagism will undoubtedly inform and enrich any appreciation of what he was up to. It can’t hurt, if taken in the right spirit. So, in conclusion, what I’m saying is that there’s very often a gap between theory and practice that it’s unwise to close without unequivocal evidence. And what actually matters is that Paul Elouard wrote a beautiful poem, not that he’s supposed to be a Surrealist and that particular poem isn’t overly Surreal. His failure to conform doesn’t make the poem any the worse. Obvious, perhaps, but a principle that’s often trampled underfoot in the critic’s headlong rush to judgement. Carts before horses, and all that. More of which momentarily . . . So the premises we’ve looked at are really broad brush strokes which it might help to have at the back of your mind while reading, but should not under any circumstances be applied inflexibly. They have, I hope, helped to define the aesthetic boundaries within which writers create their meaning, and some of the principles they themselves have formulated in their attempts to get a clearer picture of what they’re doing and how they do it. And let’s never forget that the art is always more important than any list of ingredients, and the best art will always transcend rules. The most delicious food may originate with a recipe, but it’s the chef’s personal touch that makes it truly memorable. Now let’s see what the professionals have made of that.